The Courant has the text of Governor Malloy's statement.
My position on the appropriateness of the death penalty in our criminal justice system evolved over a long period of time. As a young man, I was a death penalty supporter. Then I spent years as a prosecutor and pursued dangerous felons in court, including murderers. In the trenches of a criminal courtroom, I learned firsthand that our system of justice is very imperfect. While it’s a good system designed with the highest ideals of our democratic society in mind, like most of human experience, it is subject to the fallibility of those who participate in it. I saw people who were poorly served by their counsel. I saw people wrongly accused or mistakenly identified. I saw discrimination. In bearing witness to those things, I came to believe that doing away with the death penalty was the only way to ensure it would not be unfairly imposed. ...
This despite the recent, horrific Cheshire home invasion murders.
The Washington Post has a story on the role played by the families of murder victims in the campaign against the death penalty. However,
On the other side of the debate, death penalty supporters had perhaps the state’s most compelling advocate in Dr. William Petit Jr., the only survivor of a 2007 home invasion in which two paroled burglars [Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky] killed his wife and two daughters. Last year, Petit successfully lobbied state senators to hold off on legislation for repeal while one of the two killers was still facing a death penalty trial.
Read the full article at the link.
